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Rachele Luzzato is 12 years old when she learns her father is
seriously ill. While her family are looking forward to her
Bat-Mitzvah, Rachele's teachers happen to cast her as the Madonna
in the school's Christmas play. Pulled in opposing directions,
Rachele feels the threads of her life begin to untangle. With the
fear of losing her father, various forces compete to guide and take
care of Rachele: from her charismatic Jewish grandfather, to her
Catholic grandparents on her mother's side; and even an old teacher
who believes the young girl might take solace from a
nineteenth-century novel. These disparate influences ultimately
blend in Rachele's imagination to create a fantasy that transcends
the religious and cultural conflicts of her everyday life with one
simple hope: to end the loneliness felt by an only daughter. With
great subtlety and tenderness, A.B. Yehoshua paints a portrait of a
young girl at the beginning of her journey into adulthood.
Yehuda Kaminka, a retired teacher, returns to Israel from the U.S.
to divorce his estranged wife who is in a mental asylum, having
tried to kill him a few years earlier. The impending divorce of
their parents throws into turmoil the lives of the couple's three
children and grandson, revealing the complexity of their
relationships. Yehuda's nine days, leading up to Passover, are
remembered by different members of the family: A.B. Yehoshua's
brilliance reveals itself in these different voices, each a minor
masterpiece. A picture slowly emerges of what happened as memories
are revived, hopes expressed and dreams articulated. The narrative
gathers pace as Yehuda's visit draws to an end and he changes his
mind about the divorce agreement.
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The Tunnel (Paperback)
A.B. Yehoshua; Translated by Stuart Schoffman
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R421
R352
Discovery Miles 3 520
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Zvi Luria has begun to lose his memory. At the beginning he only
makes small mistakes, forgetting first names and taking home the
wrong child from his grandson's kindergarten, but he knows that
things will only get worse. He's 73 and a retired road engineer.
His neurologist hints at the path his illness might take and
suggests ways of comabtting it, with the help of his wife Dina.
Dina, a respected paediatrician, is keen for him to return to
meaningful activity, and suggests he volunteers to work with his
old colleagues at the Israel Roads Authority. This is how Luria
finds himself at the Ramon Crater in the Negev desert planning a
secret road for the army with the son of his former colleague. But
there's a mystery about a certain hill on the route of this road.
Who are the people living there and why are they trapped? And
should the hill be flattened and the family evicted, or should a
tunnel beneath it be built? With humour and great tenderness, A.B.
Yehoshua depicts the love between Luria and his wife as they
confront the challenges of his illness. Just when Luria's sense of
identity becomes more compromised, then does he find himself,
enabling a rich meditation on the entwined identities of Israeli
Jews and Palestinians and on the nature of memory itself. Yehoshua
weaves a masterful story about a long and loving marriage,
interlaced with biting social commentary and caustic humour.
An ageing film director named Yair Moses has been invited to the
Spanish pilgrim city of Santiago de Campostela for a retrospective
of his early work. As he and Ruth, his leading actress and longtime
muse, settle into their hotel, Moses notices the painting over his
bed depicting a classical legend of an old prisoner nursing at the
breast of a young woman. For the first time in decades, he recalls
the infamous scene from one of his early films which led to his
estrangement from his difficult but brilliant screenwriter,
Trigano, who was also Ruth's former lover. Throughout the
retrospective, Moses is unsettled, straddling the past and the
present, and upon his return to Israel, he decides to find the
elusive Trigano and propose a new collaboration. But the
screenwriter demands a price for such a reconciliation, one that
will have strange and lasting consequences. Searching,
intellectual, and original, The Retrospective is a probing
meditation on mortality, the limits of memory, and the struggle of
artistic creation by one of the world's most esteemed writers.
A husband and wife spend a week apart over the Hanukkah holiday:
Daniela visits her widowed brother-in-law in Africa to revive
memories of her sister with him but, in ways she cannot begin to
understand, he has been left wounded and raging after an earlier
tragedy - a death by friendly fire. Her husband, Amotz Ya'ari,
stays behind in Israel, rushing between his engineering company,
their grandchildren and his father. Life in the Ya'ari family is
full, complicated and humorous, but beyond it lies a fragile
society deeply uneasy with itself and badly scarred, with each
family harbouring its own ghosts. Ever-creative, A.B. Yehoshua's
short, interwoven chapters create a duet-like narrative which
penetrates deeply into human relationships and taps into the psyche
of his country.
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Five Seasons (Paperback)
A.B. Yehoshua
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R278
R230
Discovery Miles 2 300
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In the autumn, Molkho's wife dies. His years of loving care have
ended and his newfound freedom proves unlike the one he had
imagined. It is uneasy, filled with the erotic fantasies of a man
who must fall in love, but whose longing for meaningful
relationships is held hostage by the spirit of his wife. Winter
sees him in Berlin in a comic encounter with a legal adviser from
his office in Haifa. Spring takes him to the Galilee and an
impossible infatuation. Jerusalem in the summer brings another
man's wife and an extraordinary request. And the following autumn
there is Nina whose yearning for her Russian home brings Molkho
back to life. 'In this finely observed and oddly moving comic
novel?Yehoshua makes us feel [Molkho's] humanity - and deftly wins
him our sympathy.' Kirkus
Six generations of the Sephardi Mani family are chronicled in this
profound and passionate Mediterranean epic, which moves backwards
from the 1980s to the mid-nineteenth century. The story comprises
of five conversations, each centering on the fate of a different
member of the Mani family, and in each the responses of one person
are absent. Mr. Mani is surprisingly humorous, full of
extraordinary historical perspectives, and deeply wise and
compassionate. It is an imaginative tour-de-force.
Professor Yohanan Rivlin has two obsessions, the first and most
ambitious, is to understand the Arab mind - no mean feat in itself
though perhaps made easier by the fact that he lives and works with
Israeli Arabs. The second - and more personal, though equally hard
to grasp - is to understand the failure of his elder son's
marriage. Rivlin's two quests lead him to extraordinary - and at
times highly entertaining - encounters with very disparate people,
where the personal becomes intertwined with the political, as he
searches out the truth both in politics and life.
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The Extra (Paperback)
A.B. Yehoshua; Translated by Stuart Schoffman
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R390
R320
Discovery Miles 3 200
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An experiment is under way in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem: a woman,
recently widowed, is starting a trial period in assisted living,
mainly to placate her over-anxious son, whilst in Jerusalem her
daughter Noga, a young harpist, returns from her job with a Dutch
orchestra to look after the family apartment. To enliven her stay,
Noga's brother finds work for her - playing roles as an extra in
film, TV, and in the opera Carmen. The random roles Noga is thrust
into resonate strangely with her own life which she begins to
re-evaluate. Central to her past is the fact that she refused to
have children, resulting in the break-up of her marriage. No-one in
her family understood her motives for not wanting children and
everyone has a different explanation for it. Now, a chance
encounter with her former husband reveals his continuing powerful,
love as well as a shocking deed she committed during their
marriage. But Noga is a free spirit neither tied to the past nor
defined by it, and always keen to push boundaries. She lives for
her music and is willing to go wherever it takes her. The
three-month experiment proves as much of a test for her as for her
mother and both are radically transformed by the end. A.B. Yehoshua
is as creative, humorous and provocative as ever in The Extra,
exploring themes familiar to him of love, family relationships and
artistic ambitions, set mainly in an ever-changing Jerusalem.
Sailing from the North African port of Tangier to a small, distant
town called Paris are a Jewish merchant, Ben Attar, his two beloved
wives and his Arab partner, Abu Lutfi. They have come for a meeting
with their third partner the widower, Raphael Abulafia who has been
forced to turn his back on their previous trading partnership
because of his new wife's distrust of the dual marriage of Ben
Attar. The latter turns this annual trading voyage into a personal
quest to legitimise his second wife, restore his honour, and,
equally important, to show others the richness and humanity in his
way of life. A.B. Yehoshua has imaginatively recreated a medieval
world (from North Africa to Paris, from Spain to Germany) with its
merchant trade in great depth and sensuous detail. His evocation of
one man's love is lyrical, erotic even.
A suicide bomb explodes in a Jerusalem market. One of the victims
is a migrant worker without any papers, only a salary slip from the
bakery where she worked as a night cleaner. As her body lies
unclaimed in the morgue, her employers are labelled unfeeling and
inhuman by a local journalist. The manager of human resources is
given the task of discovering who she was and why she had come to
Jerusalem. As the image of this once-beautiful dead woman begins to
obsess him, the manager turns this duty into a personal mission -
he is no longer just saving his company's reputation by trying to
discover her identity and assure her of a dignified funeral. He is
now restoring her not only to her family and country but also to
common humanity - whilst at the same time conquering the hardness
of his own heart. "There are human riches here. The manager moves
from a man who has given up on love to one who opens himself to it.
And there are strange and powerful scenes - of the morgue, of the
coffin, of the Soviet base where the manager passes through the
purging of body and soul." Carole Angier, The Independent
This paperback edition brings together novellas and short stories
of the celebrated Jewish writer A.B. Yehoshua, including two
stories previously unpublished in English. Mr Mani, which appeared
in the previous hardback edition, is now a novel in its own right.
A husband seeks his wife's lover who is lost in the turbulence of
Israel's Yom Kippur War. As the story of his quest unfolds and
grows in intensity, the main protagonists are drawn into the search
and are transformed by it: through the different perspectives of
husband, wife, teenage daughter, and young Arab emerges a complex
picture of the uneasy present, the tension between generations,
between Israel's past and future, between Jews and Arabs.;'We see
an Arab and an Israeli locked into a debate of proximity,
alikeness, mental hatred, that Yehoshua's superb ability to render
both presences relieves of all sentimentality. What I value most in
The Lover is a gift for equidistance - between characters, even
between the feelings on both sides.' Alfred Kazin, New York Review
of Books
In the autumn, Molkho's wife dies and his years of loving attention
are ended. But his newfound freedom is filled with the erotic
fantasies of a man who must fall in love. Winter sees him away to
the operas of Berlin and a comic tryst with a legal advisor who has
a sprained ankle. Spring takes him to Galilee and an underage
Indian girl. Jerusalem in the summer presents him with an offer
from an old classmate to seduce his infertile wife. And the next
autumn it is Nina (if only they spoke the same language ), whose
yearning for her Russian home leads Molkho back to life.
Five Seasons is a finely nuanced, unabashedly realistic novel that
provides immense reading pleasure.
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The Tunnel (Paperback)
A.B. Yehoshua; Translated by Stuart Schoffman
bundle available
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R471
R418
Discovery Miles 4 180
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Retrospective (Paperback)
A.B. Yehoshua
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R493
R436
Discovery Miles 4 360
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A "New York Times Book Review" Editors' Choice
Winner, 2012 Prix du Meilleur Livre etranger
"The greatest Hebrew novelist." -- "Jewish Review of Books"
An aging Israeli film director has been invited to the pilgrimage
city of Santiago de Compostela for a retrospective of his work.
When Yair Moses arrives, a painting over his bed triggers a distant
memory from one of his early films: a scene that caused a rift with
his brilliant but difficult screenwriter. Upon his return to
Israel, Moses decides to travel to the south to look for his
elusive former partner and propose a new collaboration. But the
screenwriter demands a price for it that will have strange and
lasting consequences.
A searching and original novel by one of the world's most esteemed
writers, "The Retrospective" is a meditation on mortality and
intimacy, on the limits of memory and the struggle of artistic
creation.
" "The Retrospective"] moved me deeply." -- Vivian Gornick, "The
Nation "
" Yehoshua] achieves an autumnal tone as he ruminates on memory's
slippery hold on life and on art." --" The New Yorker"
A couple, long married, are spending an unaccustomed week apart.
Ya'ari, an engineer, is busy juggling the day-to-day needs of his
elderly father, his children, and his grandchildren. His wife,
Daniela, flies from Tel Aviv to East Africa to mourn the death of
her older sister. There she confronts her anguished brother-in-law,
Yirmiyahu, whose soldier son was killed six years earlier in the
West Bank by "friendly fire." Yirmiyahu is now managing a team of
African researchers digging for the bones of man's primate
ancestors as he desperately strives to detach himself from every
shred of his identity, Jewish and Israeli.
With great artistry, A. B. Yehoshua has once again written a rich,
compassionate, rewarding novel in which sharply rendered details of
modern Israeli life and age-old mysteries of human existence echo
one another in complex and surprising ways.
A woman in her forties is a victim of a suicide bombing at a
Jerusalem market. Her body lies nameless in a hospital morgue. She
had apparently worked as a cleaning woman at a bakery, but there is
no record of her employment. When a Jerusalem daily accuses the
bakery of "gross negligence and inhumanity toward an employee," the
bakery's owner, overwhelmed by guilt, entrusts the task of
identifying and burying the victim to a human resources man. This
man is at first reluctant to take on the job, but as the facts of
the woman's life take shape--she was an engineer from the former
Soviet Union, a non-Jew on a religious pilgrimage to Jerusalem,
and, judging by an early photograph, beautiful--he yields to
feelings of regret, atonement, and even love. At once profoundly
serious and highly entertaining, A. B. Yehoshua astonishes us with
his masterly, often unexpected turns in the story and with his
ability to get under the skin and into the soul of Israel today.
Yehoshua is one of Israel's most prominent novelists and a
controversial theorist on politics, culture, history and Jewish
identity. These interviews introduce him to an English-speaking
audience and reveal the interplay of literary, psychological,
mythological and political motifs in his work.
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Mr. Mani (Hardcover)
A.B. Yehoshua
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R889
R781
Discovery Miles 7 810
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The Extra (Paperback)
A.B. Yehoshua
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R368
R326
Discovery Miles 3 260
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The Lover (MP3 format, CD)
A.B. Yehoshua; Translated by Philip Simpson; Read by Betsy Foldes Meiman, Jim Meskimen, Jodi Carlisle, …
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R883
R649
Discovery Miles 6 490
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Out of stock
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